Month: January 2010

Well, I have been seeing some mail lately asking if I am alive…The answer, in short, is yes, I am still alive.The blog is still active and I review it from time to time, wishing I could do more with it. The fact is, with all of the technology that we have and the different ways to express oneself, I am finding it harder and harder to actually do. Technology has made it really difficult for us to sit back and express anything in a long handed, complex kind of way. ADD for the masses.So, I am trying to put it all together, to make sense of it all communicate out, blog style, for the world to consume at their own leisure.HAITI:I have been thinking about this terrible event a lot lately–as all of us have. 200,000 dead bodies in a city the size of Seattle. That is a lot of people, dead for no other reason than nature and poverty. I have been thinking a lot about that amazing loss and the amount of relief that has gone toward it and what’s going to become of it all– it’s a difficult thing to grasp.I think of the huge amount of different charities that were already there, trying to help that country and I think of the amount of agencies that will now be there for a long time to come– I think of the hundreds of millions of dollars that individuals will donate to that effort and where all of that money will actually end up. I fear not where it is supposed to go. What really needs to happen, from my layman point of view– is a massive re-construction project, that leads to completely rebuilding port-au-prince. The new Port-Au-Prince needs rebar in the buildings, it needs infrastructure.Sadly, I don’t think it will be managed correctly, people will look for the quick, easy solution and leave the distribution up to the same methods that have been the source of donations for so many years there.The thing I struggle with is that there is no simple resolve to this soon to be epidemic. It is going to get really, really desperate there, while the people who died from the initial blast are still rotting in the hot sun, more will perish as the heat breed disease, as people run out of supplies, things that we take for granted, like the food that we will eat tomorrow, the food and water that is in our bellies– all of it, these people on this little island in the Caribbean, no matter how many millions of dollars we think we are sending that way, people are still going to get infections, have a lack of water and will smell death at the doorway.This world that we all share together, sometimes it is unfair.My thoughts are with you tonight, Haitians. I hope we will still be with you in the months to come as the struggles get more and more difficult.